Honestly I'm happier where I am now, which is generally writing http APIs and cryptography related code in Java (with bits of Go and python thrown in).

Development in C is slow, fraught with unexpected pitfalls and you end up writing an awful lot of stuff from scratch. While this is satisfying in some ways, I find the modern paradigms of the languages I work in now to be more fulfilling - yes you throw a lot of existing components together, but you also get to deliver functionality much more frequently.

There are also a lot of very old-school C shops out there, that don't believe in modern things like CI/CD, git, even automated testing. I'm sure there are good ones too, but there are a lot of dinosaurs in that arena. One of the last ones I contracted for (for about three weeks until I quit) responded to my usual first-day question of "OK, how do we build this product?" with "Oh don't worry about that, we can sort that out later" and later never came.

That all said - I really enjoyed working on a couple of embedded devices. Seeing what you can achieve with 128kB of SRAM and 256kB of flash is challenging, and since I was a kid I've enjoyed making the computer do stuff. With embedded devices that have buzzers, leds, little displays etc, you get immediate feedback. And having to think more about things like memory allocation strategies does influence your thinking in (I think) a good way. You can definitely gain some deep knowledge!

Do you think experience holds better the lower you go down the stack? Part of my frustration with web development - especially front end, is knowledge decays very fast there. I'm fine with learning new stuff but relearning the same thing all the time and losing my edge is a big annoyance. So part of my wanting to move lower down the stack is my belief that my knowledge and experience will hold up better there. So I'm considering either that or moving to backend work writing something like Java which I also perceive to be a very good investment. .